Keeping Data Safe in the Lonestar State

How Bexar County built a better data center with Cisco

Nearly two million people call Bexar County, Texas home—making it one of the largest counties in the U.S. As you can imagine, it’s a place that produces and hosts a lot of data. And Bexar County IT must keep their network and applications running smoothly and securely 24/7.

In 2018, Bexar County set out to build a best-in-class data center. They were long-time fans of Cisco networking and wireless solutions, so they planned to bring that tech along to the new place. In the past, they used another vendor for storage and compute infrastructure, but they were shopping around for new solutions. Particularly, as one of the fast growing cities in the U.S., they wanted a partner that would help them simplify and scale as they continue to grow. They also needed to enable a multi-cloud environment – hosting some applications on-premises and some in the cloud. And of course, it all had to be as secure, too.

With the help of Sirius Computer Solutions, Bexar County IT gave Cisco the opportunity to share its holistic data center vision. Cisco promised to deliver a high-performing, scalable architecture that Bexar County and its citizens could rely on. They found Cisco’s story and solution to be compelling and decided to go all-in with Cisco.

With Cisco HyperFlex, Bexar County significantly consolidated their physical server and storage hardware supporting their virtualization environment. Next, the team brought in the Nexus 9K data center networking platform to prepare for the growing number of users and complicated applications. And because the data center was built with Cisco infrastructure, Bexar County could rest assured knowing their network and data were highly secured.

“Bexar County had previously deployed Cisco network solutions; however, their proactive approach in understanding the full requirements of our modernization strategy made them a natural choice to also support our compute and storage components. Our entire team was confident that the Cisco solution deployed would not only provide the latest in technology features today, but also continue to integrate future enhancements as they became available.” Evan O’Mahoney, CTO, Bexar County Information

In July 2019, the county unveiled their new data center to the public with a ribbon cutting ceremony. And Cisco was right there as a sponsor of the celebration. Already, the Cisco-powered data center has saved Bexar $12 million in capital costs. And with Cisco’s ongoing support, that’s just the start.

Between 2 million people and $12 million saved, there’s a bridge.

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